PAPAL LEGENDS.*
[FIRST NOTICE.]
Tars little book is a truly valuable contribution to the curiosities of history, by a writer whose name vouches at once for its critical spirit and learning. Dr. Dollinger is a man of perplexing and eccentric habits of mind, for while no one has shown himself a more devoted advocate of the religious doctrines of the Church of Rome, there is an apparently irrepressible impulse within him to keep selecting for the favourite objects of his keen criti- cism some of those not very creditible bits of doubtful anti- quarianism which have got to hang around the history of the Roman See, and which Roman Catholic writers of the humdrum type in favour at the Vatican are thankful to leave in tacit oblivion. Also it can create no surprise to learn that the somnolent dons of Rome are aghast at the recklessness which makes the German visionary drive fearlessly the scalping-knife of his withering in-
* Die Papal "'akin des iliitelaliers. Von Joh J. J. Ton Dalingen Munioh,101"
vestigation right through everything which is spurious, what- ever may be the venerable authority compromised by the opera- tion. 'rids peculiar quality of Dr. Dellinger's mind has never been shown more keenly than in the clinching demonstration
he gives of the origin of certain legends connected with the early history of the Papacy. The nine stories subjected to the dis-
solving action of his merciless criticism have all been invoked as precedents on important occasions, as if they had the in- controvertible authority of facts. Indeed, one striking contrast exists between the mythology of other histories and of the Papacy. In the former, legends spring out of the remoteness of prehistorie ground, and, as a rule, remained confined for dissemi- nation to the agency or credulous ignorance, whereas Papal legends, if not invented, have yet been adopted and deliberately accredited by canonical authorities when their matter was found
favourable to some particular interest, spiritual or secular, of the Roman See. The only exception to this latter point is that strangest of fables Pope Joan, a story which shallow Protestants loved to dwell on, and devout Catholics of learning once actually winced under, until their nervousness about grappling with a hoax of such preposterous monstrosity had the effect of over- laying it with an atmosphere of mystery, thick enough to make still twenty years ago a plodding Dutch professor conclude the evidence to be clear in favour of Pope Joan, and to puzzle a man of Ludeu's eminence whether to believe or reject the story.
We know nothing more palpably instructive of the kind of difficulties that must beset an attempt to test the intrinsic worth of legends by general principles of common-sense divination, and to reduce them back to their original germ of fact, than an observation of the apparently irresistible body of evidence to the existence of this most undoubted child of fancy, Pope Joan. Ac- cording to the current legend, a woman sometimes called Agnes, sometimes Gilberta — sometimes said to have been from England, and sometimes from Mayence—went to Athens, became in its imaginary schools a proficient in knowledge— came then to Rome, where in man's disguise she taught the sciences with a success which caused her, in or about 855, to be elected by acclamation to the Papacy, when—in one version, during the inaugural procession to the Lateran, in another, while officiating at high mass—her sex became scandalously revealed by her suddenly giving birth to a child. Now Catholic writers have sometimes pronounced the whole hoax to have been the production of Byzantine evil-mindedness, but Dr. Dellinger says that he has been unable to find any earlier allusion than of the fourteenth century, by a Greek writer, to the story, and he is convinced that it sprang up iu good Catholic soil, most probably in Rome itself. The earliest mention of Pope Joan occurs in the chronicle of a French Dominican, Stephen de Bourbon (d. 1261), who refers for his authority to the lost chronicle of a brother Dominican, Jean do Manly, But the capital vehicle for the diffusion of the myth was the once widely read chronicle of the Silesian Dominican and Papal Chaplain, Martinus Polonius (d. middle of thirteenth century). It cannot excite surprise that an uncritical generation should have swallowed a story, however strange and discreditable to the Papacy, when it came with the seeming voucher of one so intimately connected with the Holy See. Also this particular testimony long proved a perplexing incident to those who doubted the story, until recent collation of MSS. established the fact that in none written in Martinus's life- time is it to be found, and that in the later ones, where it occurs, it has been plainly thrust in between the lives of Leo IV. and Benedict 111., apparently for no better reason than that the text at that point of time offered special facilities for inter- polation. As to its date, Tolommeo di Lucca teaches us that it had been perpetrated before 1312, in which year he finished his chronicle, for he quotes Martians as the only writer who affirmed a "Johannes Anglicue " to have reigned between these two Popes. What may have precisely suggested so preposterous a story it is impossible at this time to determine, but it is a very curious fact, and in our opinion not yet sufficiently explained, that at the end of the thirteenth century a perfect frenzy for circu- lating this discreditable fable seized suddenly the monastic scribes of the day, and most especially the Dominicans, who yet were in principle the sworn bodyguard of the Holy See. To the enigmatic passion of these friars it is due that this incredible hoax became for centuries a matter of accepted belief with the most enlightened minds, and with those who had every interest to impugn its authenticity. History furnishes no more pregnant illustration of - the depths of mental helplessness into which the middle ages fell, the astonishing chorus of eminent witnesses who depose to their belief in a fable so gross that it could not but have burst at the merest prick of a common-sense criticism, which in this instance it was AS easy, as it would seem natural, that they should apply, partly from their nearness in time to the supposed event, and partly from their irresistible interest in rejecting a libel directed against the ecclesiastical order. It is in the circumstances that are connected with this spontaneous supply of an array of false testimony, so elaborate and so endowed with all the outward signs of credibility, that its production would have baffled the inventive powers of the most unbridled fancy, that the myth of the Woman- Pope has a character differing from all other legends, and offer- ing something of real value for the serious consideration of those historical students, who pretend to sift by their perspicacity the truth of early traditions. In the beginning of the fourteenth century PopeJoan's effigy was set up amongst those of the Popes in Sienna Cathedral, where it remained without challenge for two hundred years, although in that time two natives ofSienna were Popes. At Coustanz Huss quoted the case of Pope Joan without one of the assembled divines presuming to impugn his reference. The great Chancellor Gerson gave his opinion that her existence could not be doubted, and Cardinal Torquemada rests one of his arguments on the fact of a woman having once acted as Christ's Vicar, while 2E neas Sylvius, in controversy with the Bohemian Reformers, allows himself only just to lisp something about the evidence not seeming quite conclusive on that head. We must refer to Dr. Dellinger for the long file of witnesses to their own ignorance whom he brings forward, and which we can increase by one that seems to us worthy of notice, as illustrating the late date at which the highest members of the Church still lived in this unaccountable delusion. In the curious diary of Burcard, Master of the Ceremonies to Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI., there is a short dry entry of his having been severely chidden for inadvertently leading the Pope's inaugural procession to the Lateran, past a site fraught with such painfully scandalous re- collections as of Pope Joan's revealed shame.
How, then, was it brought about that this preposterous impos- ture kept so firm a hold on general belief? Dr. Dellinger attributes this to four circumstances that accidentally coincided in impressing the public with an appearance of speaking evi- dence ;—an inscription of obscure wording that met the common fate of a forced rendering; a mutilated statue close by this slab, which was assumed to represent a woman with a child in her arms; the fact that the street where these monuments stood, though leading straight to the Lateran, was generally avoided by processions, really from its narrrowness, but in popular belief from its associations ; and, finally, the use at the Pope's installa- tion down to the middle of the sixteenth century of a chair of peculiar construction. The first three circumstances are quite in the category of those proofs which popular belief is prone to conjure up in support of a popular error, but the last is attended by points suggestive of some curious reflection. The object in question was one of those open-bottomed porphyry seats used in Roman baths, from one of which it had been transferred to St. Sylvester's oratory at the Lateran, and the story was, that ever since the scandal which had befallen the Church in Pope Joan every Pope before proclamation underwent in it inspection as to sex. Dr. Dellinger is emphatic, as are indeed all modern authors, in pronouncing this asserted ceremony to be a groundless inven- tion, as everything else bearing on Pope Joan"; and yet, with all deference to his opinion, we cannot resist the impression that on certainpoints the balance of such evidence as we have hitherto been furnished with does-not incline in favour of this conclusion. In the first place, there is a strange coincidence (and Dr. Diillinger admits it) between the date assigned to PopeJoan by the earliest writers who mention her, and of the first employment of the open chair for the Pope's enthronization. Stephen de Bourbon gives A.D. 1100 as Pope Joan's date, while the first notice we have of this chair is on Paschal Hes enthronization in 1099. It continued in use until the installation of Leo X.'s successor, when we are told modifications were introduced into the ceremonies until then cus- tomary on the occasion. Now Dr. Dellinger dwells forcibly on the inconceivable credulity in a hoax for the dissipation of which, he says, all that would have been needed would have been to address a query to any cardinal or Church dignitary necessarily present at a Papal installation. But it happens that the very appeal which, as Dr. Dellinger so confidently assumes, must have resulted in a crushing refutation has been addressed. During the reign of Leo X.—therefore before the old-established cere- monies were changed--Giampietro Valerian° Bolzani, a prelate of the Papal Court, addressed Cardinal Hippolyte Medici in a harangue, which be afterwards printed in Rome with the appro- val of the Pope's Licensers on the title-page, wherein he speaks at length of the inspection every Pope has to submit to. By what process of subtle reasoning can it be made intelligible that, if the assailed ceremony were indeed an utter hoax, so deliberate a statement should yet have been ventured upon in practice of the Roman Court, and then have been sent forth in print, not merely unchallenged, but with the express sanction of the Papal authori- ties—all this happening at the very moment when the Holy See was become alive to its dangers, under the hot fire of Luther's invective against its scandals and abuses ? We are at a loss how satisfactorily to reconcile such incongruities. The circum- stances, tested by the touchstone of criticism, would appear to us to warrant the conclusion that, to say the least, it is not proven that a ceremony of the kind was not once performed. Such a conclusion does not in any way imply the slightest belief in Pope Joan. It relates solely to the points of ceremonial, and rests on the following grounds :—It is admitted that considerable changes were made on Leo X.'s death in the ceremonies of ancient origin customary on a Pope's installation, although, from the jealousy with which the Vatican records are kept, we know for certain neither the full nature of the changes nor the reason why they were made. It is a fact that the most learned men of their day, Zneas Sylvius, Gerson, and Torquemada, believed in Pope Joan. What right have we, then, for a confident assumption that the myth which conquered their superior intellects must have been powerless to encroach soms degrees further, and that a popular delusion which figured without challenge for centuries in the Cathedral of Sienna must have been unable to impress traces of its currency on the ceremonies connected with that particular solemnity which could not but be associated with a vivid remem- brance of the so widely accredited incident of its story ? Incre- dible as the performance of such a ceremony seems, it is not more incredible than the incontrovertible fact of the belief which ex- isted. We say, therefore, that on the evidence hitherto produced, this point cannot be said to be disposed of in the satisfactory manner, in which Pope Joan's claims to personal existence have been disposed of. Had the Vatican archives been thrown open, no doubt Dr. Dollinger would have stript the point of all obscurity, but as he has been obliged to leave it, there still bangs one shred of mystery around the otherwise exploded hoax of Pope Joan.
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